Cast Out as Old-Fashioned, I Watched the Mafia Fall Apart Chapter 04
Author: Jelly Pudding
I had barely walked into headquarters before I felt something was off.
Don Vincent was standing in the elevator with three of the Family’s elders.
I inclined my head to them.
“Iris.” Colby, the most senior elder, spoke first. “I hear Kelly has been doing well lately.”
Before I could answer, Vincent swept me with a warning look.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Colby. I no longer run anything in this Family, so I don’t know the details.” My voice stayed level. “As for how she is doing, you would do better to go and see for yourself.”
Colby nodded.
“Kelly is quite capable,” Vincent answered at once, sounding certain. “The Family was unsettled for a while after you left, but fortunately Kelly steadied the situation and even landed a major contract.
“In fact, she’s signing a port transfer contract with Grayson from the West Side today.”
Grayson was the most powerful figure on the West Side and famously exacting and difficult.
To land him in the first place, I pulled more all-nighters than I could count, answered every one of his concerns, and gave up three percentage points of our cut before he agreed.
And Kelly had landed him?
“And,” Vincent went on, “the young people she brought in are capable. They think flexibly, use new methods, and every member of that team is talented. I’m going to put her team in direct competition with Iris’s old team. Competition creates motivation.”
I scoffed inwardly.
Put plainly, he was propping up his niece, stirring up an internal fight, and diluting my power while he was at it.
Good thing I had made a clean break.
Whatever bond ten years had built between us had long since soured.
“What do you think, Iris?” Vincent turned to me.
My lips twisted as I started to answer. “Mr. Vincent, you may not know this yet, but I’ve already—”
“We’re here.” Vincent cut me off and waved a hand. “We can discuss this later. Come to the conference room first. Grayson is signing with Kelly today. You can learn something from the younger generation’s approach.”
My words stopped in my throat with nowhere to go.
Vera visibly relaxed when she saw me enter the conference room.
Kelly sat beside the head of the table. At the sight of me, her lip curled and she sneered, “What are you doing here, Iris? Couldn’t make a living out there, so you came to beg your way back in?”
The faces of the elders in the room darkened at once.
“And who are you?” Colby frowned, his tone openly hostile.
Vincent hurried to smooth things over. “She’s my niece, Kelly. She’s young and doesn’t know better. Please don’t take it to heart.”
Colby swept a cold look over Kelly.
“Iris is half of what keeps this Family alive. You younger people would do well to watch how you speak.”
Color came and went in Kelly’s face. She swallowed whatever she had been about to say and retreated quietly to the back of the room.
Aiden, standing beside her, turned his face away in embarrassment and didn’t dare look at me.
Before long the door opened and Grayson came in.
He saw me immediately, came straight over and shook my hand.
“I was talking to Soren, and he told me the Vincent Family had cut you. I said at the time that if you weren’t here, there wasn’t much point discussing this deal at all.
“Then your people told me you were still with them, so I came. It seems Soren and I had it wrong.”
My gaze shifted to Vera at the side of the room. She watched me with pleading eyes.
So that was it.
She had lied that I was still with the Family, and that lie was the only reason Grayson had come.
I stopped worrying about anyone’s reaction, stepped forward, and let my voice carry clearly through the room.
“Mr. Grayson, you had it right.
“I was formally cut from this Family by its new head, Ms. Kelly.”
